Madrid,
In the last edition of APERTURA Madrid Gallery Weekend, in September, and coinciding with its tenth anniversary, the Lucía Mendoza Gallery, which for some years has focused its exhibition activity on art related to nature and sustainability, began a program of samples that will last until July 2025 and is called “Relational Routes”. In successive presentations, we will be shown projects carried out by artists, represented or not by this room, who have brought to their work their concerns about environmental, social and economic imbalances, the food industry, extractivism, the challenges in water management or the call earth democracya proposal developed by the Hindu activist Vandana Shiva, who formulated ten points for the maintenance of social justice and respect for the environment.
Devised under the curatorship of Javier Martín-Jiménez and the advice of Blanca de la Torre, this initiative will have the collaboration of nearly thirty authors, who in some cases will exhibit specific works for this occasion, and beyond their obvious purposes. of awareness around preservation, aims to test the possibilities of Lucía Mendoza’s space by questioning its usual exhibition frameworks; It is the first time that the gallery adopts this other model of flexible exhibitions, which avoids fragmentation and allows the topics addressed to be developed in greater depth.
The environment, on the other hand, will be a way to provoke reflections, not only on our ties with nature, but also on our notion of otherness in a broad sense that also encompasses the human and the geographical; In the words of the commissioner, It is about questioning many of the hegemonic historical paradigms. It is a global issue that affects the way we look at and treat others, both in the past and today (…). The belief in single stories has ceased to make sense and the need to review history and culture in relation to others is evident.
The artists selected to participate in “Relational Routes” belong to very different generations and contexts, hence the importance of being integrated into this proposal, which will gradually evolve throughout its ten-month duration, adding new names and pieces, and completed with actions and activities that turn this center into a place for debate and not just exhibition.
In that first phase, which began in September, those represented by the Luna Bengoechea gallery, Josefina Guilisasti, Elena Lavellés, Lecuona y Hernández and Miguel Sbastida, were involved in the project; as well as four artists who are not: Karishma Chugani Nankani, Fritzia Irizar, Amanda Legórburu and Jenny Marketou; In a second phase undertaken in October, Bárbara Fluxá, Cristina Garrido, Liza Ambrossio, Adriana Marmorek, Yuyo Gardiol and Nicole Mazza joined and, in the remaining months, Nino Cais, Carma Casulá, Carla Chaim, Claudia Claremi, Lizania Cruz will be there. , Daniel De La Barra, Jorge García, Olalla Gómez, Blanca Gracia, Pascal Hachem, Jimena Kato, Cristina Mejías, Clara Montoya, Gloria Oyarzabal, Lara Salous and Estefanía Santiago.
Martín-Jiménez has selected compositions that take as a starting point the observation of certain behaviors generated in different moments of colonization throughout history to address the dynamics (political, cultural, economic) that have survived since then and that could be located in the origin, according to their approaches, of the current challenges derived from the climate emergency.
Based on the fact that the perception of the environment that we have as individuals is neither rigid nor constant, but subject to evolution, and that the connection with the other is an intrinsic condition of the human being – although sometimes this seems to be marked by fear and hate-, “Relationship Routes” aims to emphasize the indissoluble ties between humanity and the set of all the ecosystems on Earth and between the other as an individual and the other as the space that allows mere existence, including in that other inorganic elements, such as water, air and minerals. Martín-Jiménez considers, in the theoretical framework that accompanies the exhibition, that one cannot have a strategy to achieve greater social justice and not have or have another different strategy for the protection of the Earth; The need to respect individual rights is therefore linked to the need to not violate those that the biosphere would enjoy, that is, the set of living beings on the planet, which attend to temporal developments different from those of humans, to cycles that are strictly their own. .
Achieving this respect would require bringing it to educational plans and fighting against generalized indifference and against the equally common attachment to what is superficial, gratuitous and immediate; That is one of the reasons why “Relationship Routes” has been conceived as a long-term project.
“Relational routes”
LUCÍA MENDOZA GALLERY
C/ Bárbara de Braganza, 10
Madrid
From September 2024 to July 2025
